Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao

I read this book in two days....it was so compelling, but disturbing.

Girls aren't gone from the publishing industry. The latest book with "girl" in the title is Girls Burn Brighter  by the Indian-born writer Shobha Rao, whose debut novel tells the story of two teenage Indian girls whose friendship helps them overcome the men who try to destroy them.

When the story begins, Poornima’s mother has just died and her father, who treats her as chattel, is desperate to marry the 16-year-old off. After he hires a teenage girl named Savitha to help with his weaving business, the two girls form an instant attachment.

Then something terrible happens to Savitha. When an equally terrible restitution is proposed, she runs away, leaving Poornima at the mercy of her cruel father, who once admitted to the village matchmaker that he almost let her drown as a toddler because, after all, “she’s just a girl.”

Savitha flees to the city, where she winds up enslaved to human traffickers who subject her to unimaginable horrors. Poornima’s father forces her into a loveless match with a man whose family treats her even worse than he did. When the marriage becomes intolerable, she runs away, too, determined to find her lost soulmate.

I don't want to give away anything else, but I will say that I really thought this was a good book. A little high on drama and you had to stretch the imagination a bit, but it is important to read this novel.